Great Salutations

Denis Mair to Suzanne
Lummis

With
Memories of the late poet Edward Smith

Edward Smith was a casualty of this past winterís flu epidemic. He
and poet Charles Potts, owner of The Temple Bookstore and principal
organizer of literary events in Walla Walla, had been comrades in
art and life 23 ago. They re-discovered each other just before
Edwardís sudden death.

1/17/04
2:12:42 p.m.

Hello
Suzanne,

It must
have been difficult for Charles, to regain a friendship after so
long, and then see it swept away again. Friday night at our poetry
party was a moving evening: Charles had just picked up his long-lost
friend at the airport, and three hours later he read before a
hundred people, all of whom he knew!

In the
months before the Party, Charles and Edward had marathon telephone
conversations. I used to go down to the bookstore, and I often found
Charles on the phone. I could always tell when he was talking with
Edward: the words tumbled freely and the tone was suited to people
who understand each other. The two of them squeezed a lot of talk
into those afternoons, as if sensing there was hardly time to
exchange what needed to be exchanged. This stitching together of
sympathies is what people like Charles and Edward stand for.

I
exchanged a few good e-mails with Edward. He sent me an
interpretation of a couple of Su Dongpo poems. I wish I had kept it.
He showed fine appreciation for balances of stillness and motion,
light and shade across lines in the poems he discussed. These are
aesthetic categories that Chinese literary critics key into, and he
got the feel through his own reading.

I was
down in L.A. for a couple of weeks, and I helped shelve books at a
reading room in Chinatown. That was during the holidays, so I
didn't get in touch with you. I did get together with Richard
Modiano and watched a movie with him. Richard gave me a presentóthe
anthology of California poetry put out by Five Penny Press [Tebot
Bach].

I'm
house-sitting outside of Olympia, Washington now. Iím settled in a
round house, shaped like a yurt, with big windows overlooking Oyster
Bay. Every morning I go walking along the shore of an inlet with two
dogs. As the sun breaks through, the morning mist hangs in strata
against a backdrop of hills. For once Iím in a place where I canít
hear highway sounds!

My
duties as house sitter are mainly to feed and walk the dogs. At low
tide I walk down the hillside and down a flight of wooden stairs to
the beach. At high tide there is no beach to walk on. This morning I
started down to the stairs at high tide, to play a joke on the dogs.
The hound barked at me crazily, as if to say, "You shouldnít walk
down the stairs at high tide!"

There
are beautiful cats here. One of them looks like a long-haired
miniature lion. It climbs an 8-foot perpendicular ladder into a
cupola and sits up there gazing out over the bay! There is also a
feral cat that was caught by the house-owner. It has long ghostly
gray fur with black paws and black muzzle. It is now living like a
hermit in the study. When people go in that room, it dives beneath a
blanket. When I climb to my loft above the study and settle down, it
comes out to play with a toy mouse. If I sit still and read, I can
watch it play, but if I make the slightest move, it hides under the
recliner again.

I view
the pet-watching as my responsibility in exchange for rent. But the
critters have their winning ways, and I find myself standing at the
doorway at nightfall, hoping the little lion will get back safely.

Denis
Mair has worked as a translator in Beijing and studied for years in
a temple belonging to Tiandi Jiao, a Daoist-Confucian
religious group in Taiwan. His translations from Chinese include
memoirs by the Buddhist monk Shih Chen-hua, an autobiography by the
philosopher Feng Youlan and fiction by Chinaís former Minister of
Culture Wang Meng. He has served as a poet-in-residence at the
Temple Bookstore in Walla Walla, Washington. His book, Man Cut
in Wood, was published by Valley Contemporary Poets. Read more
by Denis Mair at www.appositive.net/oysterbay.